by Rachel Gold
But I’m me—I’m an Emily; I cried all over a Kindle screen when I realized how thoroughly I am an Emily—and thank God, or thank the gods, or thank the forces of chance, or the good fortune that comes from Minnesota, because exactly when I needed them I found sentences like this one: “It was like sitting in a dark room for months and then suddenly having the sun fall through an open window.” That’s not about hormones, or winning a legal battle, or making irrevocable decisions; it’s about how it feels when somebody else sees you as girl for the very first time. (It’s important enough that Gold nearly repeats the scene: I, too, was surprised when I learned how good it felt when a store clerk called me “Miss.”)
Part of growing up is learning how much other people are like you; part of coming out (as anything, really, but especially as trans) is realizing how most other people are not. “There had been so many years of pretense that I guess I didn’t realize how different it made me to always be pretending”: that’s in Emily’s teen voice, but it’s a sentiment that fits the lived experience of many adults.
That good fit makes for one reason so many older readers stay with, or return to, or discover, YA. The rules and conventions of YA fiction have evolved to fit the experience of coming out, of becoming yourself, at whatever age. Those rules and conventions also make YA, in general, antitragic—its endings can be inconclusive or clear, but they are rarely grim tableaux of characters resigned to the way things are. (Could things have worked out worse for a real-life Emily than they do in the novel? Of course they could—but we have newspaper stories for that.) It’s also a genre that finds it easy to fold in concise and practical instructions: how to handle therapists, what to expect when you first buy makeup, “things you can do before your parents know.” Reading this novel is, itself, one of the things you can do before your parents know.
There are other things you might be doing, things many parents would rather not know; Emily and Claire have a deeply loyal, realistically and sometimes uncomfortably sexualized, romance that looks just right to me. “It was easier to be sexual without the constant reminder that my body wasn’t right.” They’re also gamers: games, role-playing, fiction, “often felt more real than my real life.” That feeling may, or may not, go away. (For more on the merits of gaming, and more on trans and queer sexuality, consider Gold’s later novels, especially Nico & Tucker and My Year Zero.)
I have been describing the reactions, ideas and feelings that I had while reading Gold’s first novel for the first time, and, also, the way I felt while rereading it. There’s another feeling I had after reading it: it’s the feeling the great literary critic Eve Sedgwick described in her essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” which is—despite the title—possibly the first really thoughtful treatment of trans or potentially trans kids and teens in the academic literary world.
It may seem a bit dated; bear with me. Sedgwick’s 1991 essay addressed the now-bizarre, distressing, not-quite-there attitude many psychologists and psychiatrists took, in the late 1970s and 1980s, towards gender-divergent kids: they wanted to show that gay male adults were okay (when earlier psychiatry called gay men sick), without seeming to encourage gayness. Those psychologists and psychiatrists therefore decided that masculine adult gay men were healthy, while femme-acting men and boys (some of whom were no doubt trans)—well, they were the real problem; they, or we, were sick, and needed a cure. (In other words, Being Emily’s Dr. Webber.)
These unprofessional adult professionals were not only (as we would now say) erasing trans people; they were saying, tacitly, that they wanted “the dignified treatment of already-gay people” (Sedgwick’s words), but that they did not want there to be any more. Against this kind of nonsense, Sedgwick (writing in 1991!) described “many people’s felt desire or need that there be gay people in the immediate world.” (Later she might have said “queer people.”) Sedgwick, and her favorite authors, did not simply want us treated justly; she wanted and needed us to exist.
And that—for the first time, though not the last, in YA; for one of the first times in all of American fiction—is the way that all of Rachel Gold’s novels, starting with this one, treat trans and gender-divergent people, especially young people. We are not a problem, or a conundrum, or a failure that somebody needs to fix, or a population (like stray pets) our parents and teachers are obligated to protect, now that we (alas) exist: we are one of the reasons that the world is good. If the world we inherit doesn’t recognize that, we’ll fix it or build a better one. And fiction—especially fiction written for young readers—has to be one of the tools we can use.
Most parts of Being Emily address the feelings that come up when you come out, and the feelings (including Hulk-like anger) that come up when you are not permitted to be who you are. Other parts address particular arguments we can have with ourselves, or arguments that we might encounter from others (who are, sometimes, just concern-trolling), against coming out. Is coming out, or transitioning, selfish? No more so than any other life choice that isn’t entirely self-sacrifice. Why do you care how other people see you, whether and where you get to wear a dress, whether your breasts will ever be real? Because it’s terrible to go through the day or the year with the feeling your body is wrong; because most of us learn to see ourselves by thinking about how other people will see us; because that kind of feedback loop, powered by our brains’ mirror neurons, won’t go away. Is it consumerist to go to a mall and drop cash on makeup? Is it consumerist to buy—or, really, to want—anything at all?
Emily knows what she wants; she just doesn’t know how to get it, or what it will cost, or how long it is likely to take. It’s okay if you, yourself, are not yet sure. It’s also okay—and you can still learn, or see yourself, in Emily’s discoveries—if who you are and what you want does not fit into any familiar boxes. Some trans people (me, for example) are binary: we are women, even though the world said we were men, or the other way around—the world put us in the wrong box. Some of us are deeply nonbinary: neither box fits, and both of them hurt. Some of us know we’re trans (we’ve been in the wrong box) but aren’t sure what kind of trans (what box or set of boxes might be right): we have to move between the boxes, try out various places to stand, climb up, jump around, and see. (If you’re genderfluid, no one box will do: I know people who feel very male on a given day, very female on the next—they have friends who understand how they feel, too.)
There’s now a short stack of books—including some joyful books—about all those kinds of motion and labels and boxes. Being Emily names a few of them, and Gold has written a few more. I’d now add the novels of April Daniels, the essays of S. Bear Bergman, and a whole box-within-the-box of poetry, by Cat Fitzpatrick, Cam Awkward-Rich, Trace Peterson, TC Tolbert, and many others. There are even anthologies and magazines devoted to trans poetry, like Peterson and Tolbert’s ample Troubling the Line and H. Melt’s great new Subject to Change. All of these writers might help you, too, get out of the wrong boxes, or imagine the right ones.
Gender, moreover, is only one set of boxes, one category around which we organize, not just sexual, but social life. We live, all of us, in other boxes too, affinity groups or institutional categories created by things like taste (science fiction, or science fiction conventions), age (11th grade or senior citizens), race, ethnicity, profession, future profession, locale. In categorizing people, we place them in groups; we try to see who belongs together, and we hope we can feel we belong. “How could I make my way in the world,” Emily asks, “if I couldn’t stand up for myself?” But no one should have to learn to stand up on their own; we find our people, real people and fictional characters, along with our organizations and our safe physical spaces and our games and our alternate worlds that help us with the real one.
Being Emily, as much as any one book of prose, has been that help. It also moved me to tears—before I started hormones. (Now scrambled eggs, stoplights, and bad jokes about superheroes also move me to tears: that’s what it’s like being on hormones
—and it feels marvelous.) Someday this novel may feel like a historical document, a moving story about how a girl and her allies confronted antagonists that no longer exist. Until that day it’s going to be a source of hope and possibility, as well as a source of practical advice—and, in the very best possible sense, it is likely to make lots of other girls cry.
Stephanie Burt
Belmont and Cambridge, Mass./ Harvard University
December 2017
Chapter One
The noise of the alarm cut through the peaceful darkness of sleep like wind heralding a winter storm. I reached over to smack the snooze button and hit the bedside table. I’d been up half the night so I’d moved the alarm to my dresser to prevent snooze abuse. Once I’d lurched across the room to stop the grating sound, I was upright and might as well shower and get it over with.
I refused to look at myself in the bathroom mirror. During those first foggy minutes of morning I could keep being the person I’d seen blurrily during the late, dark hours when I was alone and safe. I wanted to be myself for a little while longer.
Under the hot stream of water I kept my eyes closed. It felt like I was washing someone else’s body. Even after sixteen years I had moments where I couldn’t understand how I got here or how such a mistake could’ve be made. I knew what I was, and this tall, angular body was not that.
As I scrubbed, I flip-flopped on my decision to talk to my best friend and sort of girlfriend. “Sort of ” because Claire was dating the version of me that didn’t really exist. I liked her enough that I felt bad about deceiving her, maybe more than anyone else, and I guess that’s one reason why I decided to tell her first. I’d tried to tell two other friends, years ago, but one stopped talking to me and the other laughed so hard I said I’d been kidding. Maybe I should’ve stopped trying to tell anyone, but the truth welled up in me so thickly I couldn’t hold it back much longer.
Like every other morning that winter, it was dark outside when I woke up and the window barely hinted at light when I got out of the shower. Time to confront the dozens of outfits that I could wear but didn’t want to. Worn down by years of dressing up as a boy, I’d pared my clothing options down to three basic outfits: jeans and T-shirt, jeans and sweater, jeans and button-down shirt (for days when I was supposed to look dressy).
But what do you wear to tell your girlfriend that the boy she’s dating is really a girl inside? Grandma Em had sent me a cashmere sweater two Christmases ago that I hoped would give me some courage. I loved the softness of it, even if the olive color wasn’t one I’d pick for myself; it made my skin look gray. I put it on, ran my fingers through my hair and went down to get cereal.
Dad leaned against the wall by the door, pulling on his massive, thickly lined boots. Barely taller than me, but inches of muscle wider, Dad’s dense body was wrapped in a gray flannel-lined shirt and heavy, brown Carhartt jacket. Dad was a Carhartt junky and wore their work pants in olive or tan every day, even when he wasn’t on a job. He owned four of their fifteen-pocket vests: two in “moss” and two in “shadow.”
“Lookin’ good, Chris,” he said. “Swim meet?”
“Last of the season,” I told him. “Claire’s coming.”
His eyes went unreadable. I wasn’t sure if he liked her or not, but I think he was glad I had a girlfriend this year. He nodded, waved and slipped out into the snow.
In our house, the kitchen is to the left of the front door when you’re coming in, and to the right is the living room, which turns into a den at the back of the house. The kitchen opens into an eating nook, big enough for a table of four. The house used to be a three-bedroom until Dad and his buddies built the addition over the garage that’s my bedroom. That gave him and Mom one bedroom for paperwork and crafts.
On my way to the kitchen table I grabbed milk and cereal and mumbled a “good morning” to Mom, who stood at the counter assembling sandwiches. Her turquoise skirt suit was the wrong color for her skin and gave her a pale, tired sheen. Or maybe she was tired.
At the table, I poured milk into a bowl and then dumped a few cups of Cheerios on top. I don’t know why people pour milk over cereal, that makes it get soggy so much more quickly than if you put the milk on the bottom. Mom finished making our lunches and set the two bags on the table as my nine-year-old brother, Mikey, blew into the room. His short brown hair stuck out in all directions, not that he cared. He grabbed a bowl, snatched the milk from in front of me, and poured it over his heap of cereal until the whole mass threatened to spill over the side.
Mom tried to fix his hair while he ate and managed to get the worst bits to lie down. “I’ll probably be working late today,” she told us. “But your dad will be home.”
“I’m going to Claire’s after the meet,” I said.
“Dad’s not cooking…is he?” Mikey asked.
Mom smiled. “No, there’s lasagna in the fridge. Chris, what time are you coming home?”
“Eightish,” I told her.
“You make sure you get your homework done, okay? I don’t want you playing computer games all night or whatever it is that takes up all your time.”
“Yeah.”
“Is Claire’s mother going to be there?” she asked.
Claire is the only child of a divorced mother, which worries my parents for reasons I could not begin to imagine. I think they assume that Claire and I spend every spare moment we’re alone at her house having sex and smoking pot while selling illegal weapons via the Internet.
“Yeah,” I told her, though it was a lie. Claire’s mom usually got home around six or seven at night. “She gets home around five.” As I said it, my stomach tightened. So much of my life was a lie, I hated to add to that pile of deception. But I’d hate life more if I didn’t have the relative freedom of being at Claire’s house.
I finished my cereal and looked pointedly at the clock on the microwave. “Gotta run.” I grabbed the lunch bag and stuffed it in my backpack, kissed Mom’s cheek, and made for the front entryway.
Winter in Minnesota is its own creature. Like a wild animal, you have to treat it with respect, which includes wearing a down coat and huge boots from November through March. I toed the line on those items because I refused to wear a hat if the temperature was above zero. With a little bit of gel, my dark brown hair held its natural curl, which I loved. Thanks to the popularity of Orlando Bloom and the long hairstyles in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I’d persuaded Dad that it was okay for me to keep it a few inches long, even touching my collar in the back. A hat inevitably crushed the cute little curls, and so the hat spent most of winter on the closet shelf.
I looped a scarf around my neck twice and tucked the ends down into my jacket. Then I threw my backpack over my shoulder and pushed out into the wind.
February is bleak the whole month. The days are short and cold, the nights long and frigid, the snow is feet deep and the wind has a razor’s edge. I’d turned sixteen last spring and Dad insisted on getting me a car. His passion in life is restoring classic cars. He offered me a Mustang, which I managed to dodge by pointing out a ’56 Chrysler 300B in bad shape that we could restore together. Granted I had to spend the summer working on a car with my dad while he called me “son” every five minutes, but on the bright side, I got to drive a tri-toned, candy apple red, classy, chromed-out car, rather than a dirt-ball, I-watch-pro-wrestling mobile.
The car definitely helped my reputation around school as a cool kid, and Claire reminded me weekly how lucky I was. I was a good-sized kid for my age, a little above average for the guys in my class and much too above average for the girls, while Claire described herself as “a runt.” She’s five-feet-four and skinny. I tried to tell her that if she’d stop dyeing her hair goth-black she might have better social standing, but she accused me of not understanding girls. Girls, she explained, are mean. If it wasn’t her hair that stood out, the rest of the girls would find another reason to harass her.
“I’m an outcast,” she said. “They’re l
ike wolves; they can smell it on me.”
My car was an ice block when I started it, and I sat in the driveway for five minutes, freezing my butt off while it warmed up. I could’ve gone back in the house, but Mom would try to have a conversation with me about school or Claire. She and Mikey would be out in a few minutes so she could drop him at the elementary school on her way to work. She’s the secretary for a financial planning office. Most days she works from nine to three, but once or twice a week they keep her later.
When the car had warmed up enough, I pulled out of the driveway and pointed it toward school. Like a well-trained horse, it knew the way and drove itself while I listened to the radio. In Liberty we get four stations, two from the Cities and two Christian stations. That meant my choices were “Top 50” and “Hip Hop/Dance.” I chose the latter.
Liberty-Mayer High School served parts of three counties west of the Twin Cities and had about five hundred students in a long, low, tan brick building. Being in outstate Minnesota we had about twelve students of color and the classes were, for the most part, equally colorless. I pulled into the student lot and slogged across three hundred feet of trampled snow to the front doors. A blast of hot air hit and made me peel off the scarf as I headed for my locker.
A couple of the guys on the swim team shouted greetings and I yelled back with the automated voice program that takes over as soon as I get to school. I hardly have to think about it anymore. My larynx is programmed with all the appropriate responses, and I don’t even pay attention. It’s like I wrote all the code years ago and now my brain just reads it:
/run: greet teammate
1. speak: “Hey man, how’s it going?”
2. joke about: a) sports, b) cars, c) weather, d) class
3. make inarticulate sound of agreement
4. run line 2 again
5. make gesture: a) grin, b) shrug, c) playful hit